Research

    Generally speaking, my research is mainly focus on developing a sensor fusion scheme with three different sensor sources to obtain full body state of a hexapod robot operating in dynamical regime (with significant amount of aerial phase during locomotion).  Because of 3 dimensional motion, full body state of robot contains 12 variables - 6 degree of freedom (DOF) in displacement field and 6 DOF of their derivatives within velocity field) .  Three sensor sources for fusion are leg configuration/touchdown sensor, 3 DOF rate gyro, and 6 DOF accelerometer array.

    The reason to go for body state is we believe the robust controller for a robot operating in dynamical regime or in vertical wall climbing requires certain amount of sensing ability for feedback control, and body state is one of the important ones. With enough sensor data for feedback loop, we will be able to develop real time controller for more behaviors on robot.

    Currently I use hexapod robot RHex for this research work; in the future I will also apply some part of the work into another platform RiSE which is under design and develop process.